Monday, November 28, 2005

Light the corners of my miiind, cont'd

Somewhere around my thirteenth or fourteenth year, yes, I began tohave Those Feelings. I can't exactly pin down when I connected thename to the feelings, but it was fairly early on, I know. Anyway, bythe time my well-meaning liberal parents had taken me to go see "DesertHearts" with some friends of theirs (an only child, I often wasincluded in their adult social life), I was dismally aware of just whatthe transaction there was and what it all meant, even before theinfamous scene toward the end.

These days, I sometimes think about the frisson that scene had for meat a hormonal fourteen with a strange sort of wistfulness,understandably disturbing as the whole thing was at the time; I don'tthink any erotic scene on film since has ever come close to having thesame charge (including a subsequent viewing of "Desert Hearts" in theprivacy of my own living room at age twentysomething, as well as farmore explicit material). For that matter, I never would have guessedthat someday I would wish to have back the intensity of that wholeperiod: the blushing fits at school, the pounding heart, the uneasyfascination I'd suddenly developed for leggy blonde girls with mauvelipstick, girls I'd never even spoken to and had no justifiable reasonfor doing so, girls I didn't even *like.* At the time, of course, allI wanted was for it all to GO AWAY.

To that end, as it turned out, I had some help. That same year, mygrades started to plummet, I was crying all the time, and my favoritething to do was sit in the recliner (a leftover from the 70’s, it wasthe color and texture of American cheese left too long out of thewrapper), and mope. Sometimes I would read, or pretend to read,usually the same thing over and over and over. (Robert Silverberg's"Lord Valentine's Castle" lasted me a good while. Then it was on toStephen King's "It," as I recall). But more often I would just sitand stare into space. Thinking my thoughts, all 8,000,000,000 billionper second of them. Bottom line, in retrospect: I was, no doubt,depressed, and why not? I'd just started yet another new school,always difficult for me, all the more so because a) this was highschool, a big jump under any circumstances and b) I entered in themiddle of the school year after having accompanied my mother on whatwas supposed to have been a six month sabbatical in Barcelona. And Idid not do well with new situations, or school, in the best ofcircumstances.

(We came home a month and a half into it, around late October, Ithink. There were a lot of factors contributing to my mother’sdecision to bail; I only mention it here because I now remember thatamong those factors was an “illness” I had that in fact hadn’t startedas an illness at all. Rather, I had had one of my patentedgirl-inspired blushing fits in class, one that drew me enough attentionthat I ended up chalking it up to a mysterious sickness I felt comingon, throwing in some plausible-sounding if exotic symptoms that boughtme an early dismissal from school as well as a trip to a dubiousdoctor. I still suspect that the antibiotics the guy prescribed mewere what brought on the *real* symptoms that eventually led my motherto throw in the towel).

And then to top it all off, of course, I had raging hormones, newthoughts and feelings that left me feeling more like an alien than everbefore, and no one to talk to about it, not really.

I don’t remember whose idea it first was for me to see a counselor,ultimately. I know that the subject had been floated before, once,when I was ten and approaching anorexia. This time, whoever firstbrought it up, I *wanted* to go, I do know that. I don’t know what Iexpected a counselor to do for me, exactly; or whether my parents knew,either; or whether we had, in fact, the same ideas at all about whatexactly about me needed to be fixed. All my folks probably knew wasthat I was desperately unhappy, and seemed to be getting worse. Thesexuality thing, well...perhaps that was something that should betalked about, too, sure, with someone who knew about these things. Anauthority.

So we found someone, I don’t remember how, or what her actualcredentials were. A garrulous, grandmotherly-looking woman. She had acozy little office in a converted house on a tree-lined street, likemany professionals in my quiet hometown. And she had her opinions. Quite firm ones. Some of them were helpful and some of them wereprobably less so. The one that had the most lasting effect, though,was the one I’d really come in about, whether or not my parents knewthis was the main thing on my mind (I thought they did, but there hasbeen a certain amount of forgetting and revisionist history on severalsides)--anyway, and to wit: no, she didn’t think I was gay, not really. In fact, she seemed sure of it. Certainly she was surer than I was. But then, she was older, and wiser, and--more important--louder. Mostimportant, she told me what I thought I wanted to hear.

In other words, I wasn't really feeling what I thought I was feeling.(which seemed sort of okay, since nothing I was feeling was resultingin anything good). I was "confused,” as adolescents are wont to be, Iwas "obsessing," and, perchance, spending too much time on my own. Which, in hindsight, well, DUH; but, also DUH, these things are notmutually exclusive with sapphic inclinations. According to her,though, said inclinations were something apart, something one reallywanted to consider every other plausible explanation for beforeaccepting the possibility that they might just mean what they seemed tomean. Oh, she didn't say this, of course. Not *exactly.* But, forinstance, she just really didn't see me living "that lifestyle." (Iwish now I’d asked her what that lifestyle consisted of; it might havegiven me some ideas...) What did I know? I believed her. ...And, ofcourse, I didn't believe her. Not really. But even conditionalreassurance that I was okay was better than nothing, I guess. At leasttill the last round of soothing noises wore off. So I kept gettingmore and more tearful and despondent. And obsessive, yes. Cognitivedissonancewill do that to you.

The interesting thing, for me, in retrospect, was the relativesubtlety of the process, and how, in a way, it might've been worse thanif she’d flat out said something along the lines of "Gay people donot have blood in their veins like yours and mine, but a sticky blackichor..." My family was never religious and always socially liberal;my mother had a couple of gay (male, much older, and probably notreally approachable even if I'd been so inclined) acquaintances evenback then. Insecure as I was, I probably would've recognizedout-and-out homophobia, especially with an overtly religious messageattached, as the pernicious bullshit that it was. Maybe, *maybe*, Iwould've gone from there to figuring, "hey, if she's wrong about*that*, then maybe she's wrong about me, too. Maybe I should put mytrust in myself instead of this person." Maybe.

Instead, what I got was a barrage of outdated "tests"--draw a tree,for instance--and being told that most genuinely "sexually confused"people draw a split trunk, whereas my trunk was straight! And beingsubjected to lots of stories from this more-or-less kindly,grandmotherly-looking person about her own youth (she wasn't real bigon actual listening, this particular counselor, I suspect). And havingspecial sessions with a *male* counselor, on account of (I think thiswas probably the theory) I didn't trust/like men sufficiently, or getenough strokes from them or something, and needed a proper model. Thiswanna-be SNAG doofus told me about his childhood weight issues, andhow he still struggled with them sometimes, and how I really must goout and see "The Princess Bride," because "you *are* a princess, youknow."

That was the year--first and only--that I and my family ended upattending synagogue--first a local Reform one, then a Conservative onewhose rabbi was a bit friendlier. My nice humanist heathenish parentswere probably convinced by the therapist that I needed moreafter-school activities and more socialization, which was probablytrue, in and of itself. I can't recall the temple stuff having anylong-lasting impact on me one way or the other; both synagogues werefairly laid-back, they *did* get me out of the house, with other peoplemy age, and away from my endless ruminations, which, again, in and ofitself, was undoubtedly a good thing. Interesting, though; it didn'thit me until much, much later that the counselor had specificallyrecommended that there be a *religious* aspect to my structuredactivity. I remember--just--asking her "why?" and her answeringsomething evasive, yet firm.

Another suggestion of hers led to my attending one of John RobertPowers’ eight-week modelling workshops, along with my supposed bestfriend at the time, who knew nothing about the subtext of all this (andwho had said a number of actively homophobic things in my presence. idon't think we ever really liked each other). Workshops of this ilkwere not new to me, of course. I'd taken dance and acting and suchlikeall through my youth, at my own request. Once again, in hindsight, it'spretty clear that this was meant to be some sort of getting me intouch with my feminine self-esteem, or some such, which is hilarious,because I was ridiculously femmey as a child--hated sports, lovedmakeup, had two-inch nails in various art-deco colors, room as pink asI wanted it to be. So I enjoyed the modelling lessons without muchthought as to their purpose. I *was* distracted by the femalemodelling teacher, not in any straightforward way by this time; Iremember staring at her nose in some anxiety and thinking "wow, hernose is really straight. I wish my nose were like that." (This wasanother of counselor's tenets, one I'm sure is familiar to others:essentially, "you're looking at women because you want to BE them, notDO them.")

Oh, yes, there was the session where the modelling teacher asked allus girls how many of us wanted to get married. Everyone raised theirhands but me. Oddly enough, I felt totally comfortable in notnecessarily wanting to be married, as my mother had gone out of her wayto emphasize that career and my own happiness (ha) was at least asimportant as getting The Ring. Meanwhile, I was turning beet red inEnglish class whenever the teacher mentioned the word "gay," even outof context, sure that EVERYONE knew and was looking at me. ("John Gaywas an author...") Part of this is standard adolescence angst, of course; and yet, today I think: was this trip really necessary?

Really, in many ways I think these counselors' beliefs and techniqueswere not all that different from the so-called ex-gay groups, exceptthat they didn't push an overtly Christian agenda. (My parentswould've pulled me out the door in a hot minute if they'd tried). Years later, in grad school, I was fascinated by the ex-gay stuffcoming over the news and worked it into a play. Despite the fact thatthe character in question was a hyper-anxious adolescent who saw a veryfamiliar sort of secular counselor before putting herself at themercies of the fundie Christian Beverly LaHaye type character, I never quite made the degree of the connection until--well, now, more or less.